


November 17th 1977

by cousingreg



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: 1970s, Afterlife, Alternate Universe, First Love, Friendship, Gen, Inspired by The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold, Murder, Protective Siblings, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 22:22:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29989701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cousingreg/pseuds/cousingreg
Summary: I think of May and her glossy lips, her eyes under the sun, and I want to kiss her. I want to be breathless and alive. I want to sneak out to Dairy Queen with Evan and Maddie, and get the chocolate dipped that Evan loves. The vanilla cones, and the sundaes. I want to shoot a touchdown and I want my brother on the field with me. I want Maddie cheering in the stands with my parents who love us. I want May to kiss me in victory, and I want the house and white picket fence. I want a life with dogs and kids, and art on the lawn, and footballs tossed. I want tolive.
Relationships: Daniel Buckley & Maddie Buckley & Evan "Buck" Buckley, Daniel Buckley & Shannon Diaz, Daniel Buckley/May Grant, Evan "Buck" Buckley & May Grant
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	November 17th 1977

Dying was never something that I planned. No one does, really, but we do, because we always think in eighty years, in thirty. Never now and never when you’re just about to kiss the pretty girl in your economics class. Her name is May, like the month, filled with Spring air and sunshine. Her dark eyes bore into mine, intense and more life filled than anyone in that whole damn place. “Go out with me, at the mall. We’ll meet under the gazebo, you in?”

“Sure.” My own smile spilling out, I couldn’t say no.

“See you there, Daniel.” And her smile is gorgeous, her cheeks reddening as she went off to catch up with her friends.

I was left staring in wonder and awe, and a quick, “Yes,” said to myself as I pounded my fist in the air. I hurried on out of school, into the fall air cold and bright, hurrying home where I know dinner will be. Something tasty and delicious, our mother never disappoints. My older sister Maddie won’t be there, and that’s startling in itself. I’m not used to her not being there, but ever since she graduated and married just as suddenly, we hardly see her. Mom says she’s got her own place to take care of now, her own husband. But I still remember the happy smile as she swung on the swings down the road at the park, hair in pigtails. Not yet nineteen and pulled down.

She had dreams. She told me, about going into becoming a nurse. Maddie’s been obsessed with the idea ever since our youngest brother, Evan went through his chemo treatments. He’s okay now though, young and fourteen, a little awkward and bumbling, and always trying to do the next best thing. Maddie wanted a full life and to travel, and to help people, but then she met Doug and I swear that I heard him hit her once, but when I told mom she only smiled tightly and said that it was nothing. I’m not sure what to do about that.

Late one night I looked over to Evan’s bottom bunk and said, “What do you think of Doug?”

Evan looked back with a pout and said, “He’s mean.”

“Yeah?”

But before I could ask why he thought that, our mom yelled for us to get to bed. The next morning we were finally getting Evan out of my room. My own room, at least. Because now that Maddie’s gone, I’m free. But I still worry for her.

Even now as I have a date with May, and I still can’t believe that, I’ve been crushing on her for two years, ever since I was fourteen and she let me borrow her pen in Calculus. I still think of my big sister, more warm than our parents. More kind too. More interested. I’m thinking of a way to figure out Doug and if she’s really okay, when he’s suddenly there in front of me.

My murderer.

“Hey, Danny.” He says, and the rest… As they say… Is history…

~

I could tell you what happened, in excruciating detail, but I won’t because it hurts to, and because I don’t want you to hurt either. I didn’t even know what really happened. I woke up and I was running. Running away and as far as I could, the darkness of the night descending, a fog so thick it was hard to breathe. I know now that I was choking on the remnants of blood filling my lungs. At the time, I thought I was getting Evan’s asthma.

“What’s going on?” I asked myself as I looked around at an empty house. I was home, but no one else was. And then there were whispers, pieces of conversation that I couldn’t understand.

_“Have you seen your brother?”_

_“He’s late.”_

_“Hey, Maddie, sorry to call you but have you seen Daniel?”_

“MOM!” I called, but no one answered. I was alone. I ran from room to room, but I was being buried in something that I could no longer grasp. I ran out the front door and ran and ran. I heard my father’s voice, _“I’m sorry, but could you take a look at this photograph? This is my son, he didn’t come home after school, after football practice. Please._ ”

I heard him but I couldn’t see he and I kept running, and running but I was sinking, sinking into sand and dirt, and mud. And I was disappearing…

~

“You can open your eyes now.” A voice says, and I’m not sure who it is, but she speaks to me as if she knows me.

I sit up quickly, too quickly and look to a woman who smiles with crinkles by her lips and eyes. Brown hair and gaze that’s both fiery and kind. The sun of green leaves shining through. I stand up and look around, feet moving on wood. On the gazebo that I was supposed to meet May at. Could I still get there? Am I too late?

“Who are you?” I ask instead. She’s older than me, a few years. Maybe twenty one, or twenty two. I was sixteen when I died. When I was murdered. Sixteen and an up and coming football player. I was at the height of success, everyone knew me, and May asked me out. I was too chicken shit to do it myself, but she did. And Maddie… Evan…

“Shannon.” She smiles. “I’m dead too.”

I can’t quite believe it but as I start to look around, I can. The trees and the forest, and even the sun is all so unreal. Unnatural. Skewed and formed into something more… Beautiful.

“Where are we?” I ask as I look from the curling of leaves, as though they’re hands of their own, to the dirt that sinks into a darkening pit of despair. My eyes snap up as her hand touches my shoulder. I look to her and ask, “Heaven?”

She laughs and it’s like bells. “Not quite.” Is her cryptic reply, but at my confusion, she takes pity on me. “We’re in the in-between.”

“In-between?” I repeat, confused beyond belief now.

Shannon nods. “Heaven’s over there, Earth’s over here.” She points from one direction where the sun shines brighter, to another where it shines more real.

“Why am I here?” I end up asking. “Why are you?”

She quirks an eyebrow. “Don’t you have a date?”

I suck in a breath and turn quickly, and before my very eyes the scene changes, and suddenly I’m peeking in through the gazebo’s wooden frame, to the real one in the mall. The one where May sits, beautiful with her hair done up and her best dress on. She doesn’t look happy though, she looks incredibly sad, and suddenly my little brother is there, Evan. He looks like he hasn’t slept in ages, an uncertain and grief stricken smile on his lips as he holds up the love letter that I wrote to her once. That was back when we shared a room, I tucked it under the mattress thinking that Evan was fast asleep.

Apparently not.

I want to be angry, but May is shedding tears and it aches in my heart as Evan holds her close, patting her back gently, eyes wide and lost.

They’re comforting each other, I realize, because I’m not there. I’m gone. I’m…

“You’re dead.” Shannon reiterates, and I turn to her angry.

“I can’t be dead!”

She just looks sadder. “Don’t you remember what happened?”

And I do, but I don’t want to. I run away from Shannon, from my brother and May, from the gazebo, from everything not real. I just run, and run, and run. I run until the forest disappears and there are only snowflakes left, where big snowmen sit, moving by me just as quickly. The ones me, Evan, and Maddie used to roll together when we were younger in our cold Pennsylvania winters. Where we’d steal carrots for the nose and find pebbles for the eyes. Where we’d sneak out dad’s hat and mom’s scarf, and dance around in glee at our creation.

Those memories hit me and I falter from running. I might even stop. Because the more I run, the more I realize that I can’t run from my memories. They’re always here, right with me. And so is what happened.

With a defeated heart and an unfairness of it all, the anger all consuming, I turn back.

~

“Why am I here?” I ask her.

Shannon looks sorry as she tells me, “You’re here because you don’t want to move on.”

“How can I?” I’m staring into a new scene, arms over the gazebo as my sister cries big hiccups into her hands. The phone hung on the hook, a bruise blossoming on her cheek that hurts to look at. “ _Maddie._ ” I whisper, and she shouldn’t be able to hear me, but her whole body stutters to a stop. Her eyes wide and teary filled as she looks from one corner of the room to the other, confusion arching in her eyebrows.

“Daniel?” She whispers.

And I stop moving too. My heart in my throat I say, not sure if it’s to myself to Shannon who stays by my side, “She heard me.”

“Yeah.” Shannon says softly. “We can do that sometimes.”

“MADDIE!” I yell, but she doesn’t take any notice of me again, instead she dries her tears and goes for her jacket.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Doug asks, and I cringe at his voice, at the long dark shadow attached to his body. On the other end of the hallway as Maddie grips her jacket tightly. Nerves and fear, and I just want to reach out and punch the guy, but I can’t. I can’t because I’m dead in the in-between in a gazebo, and I’m trapped.

And so is she.

“To help. With the search.” Maddie tells him, but she doesn’t pick up her jacket. She stays frozen with it clutched in her hands until Doug walks over and takes it out.

“I think it’s better that you stayed here, don’t you? He’s probably just at a friend’s house, or maybe he ran away. He’ll come back.”

“He wouldn’t-” She snaps, eyes blazing on his, but she cuts herself off at Doug’s glare. More softly as she looks down where her jacket was, says, “He wouldn’t do that to our parents. To us. He wouldn’t run away either.”

They haven’t found my body yet, and something tells me that they won’t. The dirt sinking into my boots, into the gazebo is a clear sign that they really won’t. I look to Shannon who tilts her head in the same sadness. She walks over through the sliding mud and puts a hand over mine. “They never found my body either.” She tells me.

“I’m sorry.” I say.

“Me too.”

Maddie doesn’t go along with the search, she stays home by the phone, foot tapping on the wood floor as Doug drinks a beer, staring at the TV. The sun declines into darkening shadows, and Maddie looks ready to pounce at any sudden movement, but they’re not calling her tonight. They’ll call her in the morning, after the cops have gone over the cornfield and the coroner has done his calculations of the blood volume lost. Once they know for sure that no amount of blood lost like that… That anyone could survive.

~

“We found something.” Tommy says, one of the deputy’s in our small town.

Athena, the town’s chief of police has her hands on her hips, eyes saddened and terrified. But more than that there’s a strength there, a steely determination that is so much like May’s, it hurts to look at.

They both crowd around the hole in the ground that has been quickly covered up, more blood soaked into the ground, and underneath that, my varsity jacket. They must be wondering how my murderer could have left that behind, but he was so excited by killing me, by what he had just done, a high that I cannot fathom. He didn’t even realize what he had left behind.

“It’s Daniel’s.” Athena confirms as she uses a pen to pull it more clearly out, my name stitched into the inside of the collar by Maddie’s hand. **‘** _D. Buckley,’_ it reads. My name. Me. Mine. “Shit.” Athena whispers, and I’ve never heard her swear before. I’ve seen her around town, we all have, even at school at teacher-parent conferences. I wasn’t paying much attention to her though, all my focus was on May and the way that she would tuck her hair behind her ears. Her smile large and beautiful. I couldn’t breathe or speak as I ducked my head away. My heart in my throat.

“Who’s that?” Evan had asked as we waited for our mom to come.

“No one.” I said, pulling him away. Despite my own confidence on the field and off, when it came to May, I was too terrified to do anything. Let alone meet her gaze. Evan never had a problem with talking to pretty girls, of course May is much more than that, but Evan did have a problem with confidence. He wanted to try out for the football team but ended up balking at our parent’s firm words about his previous illness. About his asthma that hasn’t disappeared completely. I wanted him to go for it, but Maddie was worried too and before we knew it, that idea was shot down before it ever really came to anything.

“Alright, everyone!” Athena yells, and the memory fades to the cornfield that blows fall air across the stalks. “This whole field is a crime scene. I’ll go talk to the family.” She says the last part to Tommy who nods and takes over.

I turn away from the scene, eyes shifting shut as I tell Shannon, “I don’t want to see this part.”

“Then look away.”

And it’s not unkind, in fact it’s the most kind thing I’ve heard since the act that took it all away from me.

~

I watch my sister instead, as the phone finally rings and she picks it up. A hand to her mouth in a gasp as tears come and Doug asks, “What? What is it?” He looks almost scared. I only feel angry for that. How dare he be scared? HOW DARE HE!?

The bruise on my sister’s cheek throbs as she yells at him, throwing her hands against his chest, yelling, “I knew he wouldn’t run away! I knew it! I KNEW IT!”

“ _I knew it._ ” She falls into a heap and Doug takes too long to catch her. Big heavy sobs that crush me just as much as they crush her. And before Doug or I can blink she’s grabbing her jacket, readying to leave.

“Where are you going?” Doug asks, eyes scared on hers, but no tears himself. No inch of sympathy.

“To see my brother.”

His hand clamps down on her own and he tells her, “No.”

“THEN HIT ME!” She yells back, and he’s startled, uncertain. Enough for her to get out of his grip and out of that house. She races home, and I shift to Evan, listening on top of the stairs to the blood and the jacket, and my death. My murder.

I yell at him, “GO! GO! UPSTAIRS! COVER YOUR EARS!” But he doesn’t hear me. When we were younger and our parents argued, yelling at the top of their lungs, I’d put my hands over his ears. Curl into the bottom bunk with him and press my palms against his ears. Make sure that he didn’t hear. That he never had to.

Sometime later, without fail, Maddie would come in, car keys in hand and we’d make our grand escape. All three of us to the Dairy Queen Maddie worked at. She had the keys to open it and she’d sneak us in, making Evan an ice cream cone, vanilla. One for all of us. But Evan always wanted it to be dipped. We couldn’t deny him, and we stayed sometimes all night, until we snuck back in at the early morning hours, stomachs full of ice cream and the wind from a long drive. Usually mom and dad didn’t even notice us gone, or if they did, they never said anything.

That changed when Maddie left, but I was sixteen and with a license I took on that role. But it was never the same. For one we couldn’t get into the Dairy Queen, but for two, it’s just not the same without her. Without one of us. I’ve missed her. My sister.

When she comes into the house, our parents startle and she pauses, staring almost startled herself, but then her eyes land on our baby brother and she’s moving. She races to him and puts her own hands over his ears, and holds him close. The only brother she has left now.

“Maddie, we didn’t expect you.” My father says as my mom breaks down. Athena reaches out but she shakes her off and runs to her room. My father left to clean up after, to keep our family together, but he just shows Athena out and heads to the garage where all of his toy models are. My sister left with a crying Evan in her arms.

Pulled apart and broken.

I’ve never really hated dying until now. Never this much. Never this fiercely or scarily.

The anger boils up in my veins and the gazebo rumbles and breaks, and a storm is coming. I feel it all, I feel it.

My murderer is smiling and I want him die. Die screaming and choking on blood the way I did. I want his whole life to be broken apart. I want him to be the one in a gazebo stuck watching from afar, powerless. Helpless.

I want him to sink into that hole.

“Daniel…” Shannon whispers, voice so calm it doesn’t feel right. I turn to her and she’s looking at me with her sorry eyes again, and I want to shake her off. To yell. “This isn’t the way.” She tells me, but it’s all I have. It’s all-

“It’s okay.” And I’m crying, and sobbing into her arms, and I feel her tears too.

“It’s fucking unfair!” I scream into her chest, and she’s nodding, agreeing with me.

“It fucking is.” And I’m startled by her swearing, enough to pause and feel the quacking anger rescind, even just a little bit. For now.

And when I look back Evan has stopped crying, and he’s wiping Maddie’s tears away. Maddie is smiling sadder now as she tells him, “I’m not going anywhere, Evan.”

“You won’t leave me like Danny?” His voice breaks and I crumple under it all.

“He didn’t want to leave us.” Maddie says, and she’s so sure the gratitude in me is profound. “But I promise.”

She holds up her pinky and Evan swings it around with his own and I’m taken back to the day Evan was born. When I was upset and angry. Only two, but I still remember how I felt like I was going to lose something. I couldn’t even name it or understand. But I remember the anger and I remember Maddie swinging her pinky with mine. “Nothing’s goin’ change.” And she might have been repeating our parent’s words, but we made a promise. And things didn’t change, we were still best friends, we just had another best friend now too. _Then._

“See? They’re going to be fine without you.”

And it’s the most cruel thing I’ve ever heard.

~

May is lost in something deep and dark, and I’m left watching her. There’s dark circles under her eyes and a steely determination as she goes from student to student asking them when the last time they saw me was. She has little notes written in her notebook. The one she used to doodle flowers in with intricate vines, her eyes lighted up in joy that always took my breath away. It seems though, that being a cop is more in her blood than being an artist.

“Ow!” She yelps as her and Evan bump into each other in the halls. Evan’s a freshman, and May is in the same year as me, junior.

“Sorry.” Evan says and his cheeks tinge red.

She smiles softly and sadly too. “Oh, I didn’t see you there, Evan. I’m sorry.”

“It’s just Buck now.” He replies curtly, and it startles me at how he says it. As though ‘Evan’ is impossible to hear.

“Buck. Right.” She smiles and Evan stares at the notebook she dropped, at the notes with my name edged into the pages. Blotted ink where obvious tears mixed together.

“You’re trying to figure out what happened?” He asks wide eyed, her notebook still in hand.

“My mom’s doing a great job, but- but she’s a cop you know? Kids don’t want to talk to her like they’d talk to me.”

Evan hands the notebook over and considers her before breaking out into a grin that I’ve missed. “Can I help too?”

She blinks a little. “Really?”

“Yeah, I mean… My parents won’t talk about it, and- and Maddie’s busy with nursing school now. They all seem to have…”

“Moved on.” May finishes for him.

And I think about the months that have passed. How the school year is almost ending, and how Evan has laid awake every night with my face in his mind. How May keeps asking and looking, and searching. How my mom stays in bed twenty hours of the day, and my dad busies himself with work and models. The first few weeks, there was hope of an end. An idea of justice. Now there’s faded stalks of corn, and blood lost in the dirt.

My jacket is in some evidence locker, but I’d rather it be on my brother’s arms. Somewhere in my room even. Somewhere where it matters.

“Yeah.” Evan replies as they look around to the students who have forgotten me. I’m still there, lingering, but by next year that’ll all have moved on. It hurts more than it should, but this right here, my May and my Evan, never forgetting, still trying to put the pieces together… It helps. It makes my lips crack into something like gratitude and love.

“I could use the help. I’m putting together a timeline actually. Come to my house after school?” She’s hopeful and Evan is too as he grins, but it’s levered with sadness. With grief still fresh as it is old.

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

~

Evan’s birthday passes by without any excitement or joy. There is no birthday party or cake, and he doesn’t ask for the most outlandish presents like he did before. Our house is quiet and big, and there is no more laughter there. My mom lays on a bed and stares at the wall. Maddie cooks and cleans, and does her school work. Evan mows the lawn, shovels the snow, and searches for me.

Maddie though, she doesn’t forget. She drives Evan out to Dairy Queen and they have chocolate dipped cones on his birthday, his favourite. “We should get a vanilla one.” Evan says. “You know, for Daniel.”

Maddie’s eyes crinkle in tears as the cool summer’s breeze goes by. “Those were his favourite.”

“Is.” Evan mumbles.

And Maddie pauses, eyes looking over to our brother as she says, “Evan you know that he’s-”

“It’s Buck!” He snaps, all of fifteen and with the attitude to match now. Maddie stills and waits, and Evan quickly apologizes. “I’m sorry, Maddie, it’s just- I know, okay? But we still haven’t found him yet. I’m not giving up… Even if you have.”

He mumbles the last part, and it hurts to watch them fight. To watch the world around everyone I’ve ever cared for, crumble.

“You have no idea…” Maddie tells him, eyes on his filled with rapidly forming tears. “I think about him every day, Evan, but Athena is on it, and I- He… You know what he was like. At the top of the world every day. Even when he was sad, he never showed it. He wouldn’t want us being sad forever or giving up everything because he- Because he can-”

She breaks off into a sob and Evan is throwing his ice cream away, arms wrapping around her. “I’m sorry, Maddie. I’m sorry.” And he’s sobbing too.

And from where I stand on a gazebo in an in-between place, so do I.

“It will get easier.” Shannon promises, and I turn to her, the sun shining in my eyes. It’s no longer happy or bright, instead it burns and makes a dull ache in my head that never subsides. The blood choking in my lungs.

“Yeah?” I ask bitterly. “When!?”

She smiles sadly and looks down. “I didn’t mean what I said before, about them being better off without you. I just- I’m sorry.”

I don’t look back at her, my eyes are on my brother and sister as my tears continue to fall, but I do say, “Okay.” Because in a place like this, grudges are fleeting and obsolete. Death is final. Life is a bending road filed with misplaced anger and frustration, and never enough love or forgiveness. I feel drawn to the more real sun today, but I stay here.

I stay right here.

~

Evan is sixteen when he gets his first kiss. I see the way his cheeks redden and his steps falter all the more around May. The beginnings of what seems like an innocent crush fade into the forefront. I watch as they sit on her bed one day, going over her mom’s witness reports (without her permission of course), and Evan reaches over, and there’s a moment. A barely there space between them before he leans in and seals the deal.

I’m left standing in a broken gazebo, angry and wrathful, but yet somewhat proud. My baby brother has surpassed me. He’s gotten his first kiss, something I never will have. I know, I was at the top of the world, a star footballer and girls asked me out, sure, but it was always only ever May. I knew somehow that one day I’d marry her. It seems I was wrong too.

“Buck, what are you doing!?” She yells as she pushes him away, and Evan’s eyebrows draw together in confusion.

“I just thought…” He tries to say.

“You’re Daniel’s brother.” She says, then with eyes looking down at the scattered police reports. “You’re like my brother.”

And Evan shudders a little before he smiles, trying to cover up the hurt. “Sorry, I just, the moment… What am I a bad kisser or something?” He asks, genuine hurt in his eyes that makes me ache as my fingers dig into the white wooden frame.

May’s face falters. “Evan, you know-”

“It’s Buck.” And he’s standing and smiling despite the redness rapidly developing in his eyes. “It’s okay. I uh- I have to go.”

“Buck… Buck!” She calls, but he’s already running away. Running down the streets, the lights darkening around him. Darkening around the both of us as he stops and cries into his hands, and I know that it’s not just being rejected, it’s me too. The broken piece that shards through. I never knew existing could be so horrible.

But Evan is a fighter, ever since he was eight and choking on his own breath. He stands up taller and walks home, and it takes a few weeks but he gets over it. May approaches him one day and says, “Buck, I’m sorry, I just- I don’t feel that way about you. But you’re still my best friend.”

Evan smiles and it’s only the littlest bit of hurt this time, but I know it will soon fade. We all do. A passing by crush. That’s all. Nothing like the way her heart made my heart beat faster, cheeks redden, and words locked into my throat. The way I pictured our first house, and rings on our fingers, and a life with laughter and art, and football games with our sons. Art lessons with our daughters. The love I bore her… It’s incomparable.

“It’s okay, May. After all, you’re my brother’s girl.” He smiles and her sadness and grief comes in, but Evan wraps an arm around her and I know that they’re going to be just fine.

I picture our life if I were to kick him hard enough, my murderer. If he wasn’t even born in the first place. I picture my varsity jacket around May’s shoulders as I run through the touchdown, winning the championship. Taking her to the spring formal. College spent with feet locked together under a library table. Her sketching my face over her law books. Me, with my history on war and renaissance.

I picture all of this on the gazebo that I never made it to, where my lips tingle where a first kiss between us never happened.

“They’ve got each other.” Shannon tells me.

And it’s supposed to be a comfort, but it’s not. _I_ should be there. _Me._

“Take me somewhere nice, Shannon. Somewhere where it doesn’t hurt.” I turn to her and there are more tears in my eyes, in hers too as she nods. And suddenly her hand is in mine and she’s smiling, laughing as we enter a new land. One filled with all types of dogs, big and fluffy, black and white, and golden. A world of our own.

A beautiful one.

~

I watch painfully as May’s parents argue and fight. There’s a war raging in her house and she takes Harry out of it whenever she can. Harry’s her younger brother. Younger than Evan by a few years. She too puts her hands over his ears so he won’t have to hear. She doesn’t understand whats going on with them, but I do, and it breaks my heart. I’ve always liked Athena. Even when she was only Mrs. Grant or Chief Grant. She never forgot me. Even when she was pulled into other cases and duties, my case file stayed in her desk drawer. At least once a week, she would trace her eyes over the facts and try to come to some new conclusion. Every year she’d go through the witness list again. Her smile crinkled at the edges as she visited my family, as my mother never got out of bed to greet her.

“I just don’t understand why you guys have to fight all the time!” May yells one day, fed up with it all.

“You wouldn’t understand, May…” Michael tries to say, but Athena has her hands on her hip and a darkening storm in her own eyes.

“You’re not a child anymore.” She says, and it’s true. May just turned eighteen. She’s thinking of colleges and applications. She’s so smart, she could get in anywhere, but I know in her heart she’s thinking of staying. Of putting that all to the wind because of me. And it hurts to be the reason she won’t leave, but it leaves me very happy to know that she’d stay for me. Maybe if I got the chance to be older, I’d see that letting a bird free is better than caging it. But she’s no bird. She’s my girl.

“Athena…” Michael starts, her father.

Athena looks to him and shrugs. “The kids will find out soon enough, and she’s asking.” But Athena does look sorry as she says the terrible words, “We’re going to get separated, May. I’m sorry, but it’s not working for us.”

I sometimes I thought about what it would be like if my parents separated. I thought about no more arguments, or hate, or ignoring us except for our accomplishments. But in all of that there was no love afterward, no tight hugs. Everything stayed the same. It was me and my siblings against them. Always a united front.

“Why? I- I don’t understand.”

~

“That sucks.” Evan says when she relays the information. “I’m sorry, May.”

He touches her arm and comforts her when I can’t. When I’m left standing on broken pieces of wood in a gazebo that’s decaying.

She shrugs with tears in her eyes and tries to smile. “I’ll be alright, I’m just worried about Harry.”

“Does he know yet?”

“Mom and dad are going to talk to him tonight, but can we not talk about that right now?”

Evan looks like he wants to keep talking about it, but after second thought and with a flicker of his eyes he smiles big and wide. “Sure, how’s your application essays for college?”

She groans and he chuckles and they’re just two best friends laughing and joking again. No longer with the weight of the world on their shoulders. They’re still looking for me. I’m still looking for me too, but they’ve found a way to live as they do. I’m not so fortunate. I’m stuck in my last dying clothes and breath. Beyond even.

“So you really think that they’ll be okay?” I ask Shannon.

She shrugs too. “I have no idea.” Her arms land on the wooden frame of the gazebo too as she leans over and stares at the new scene before us. Of Hen coming home with a man in tow. Her mom is overjoyed, but Hen is quick to reassure that he’s only a friend. Her best friend in fact and needing a new place to go.

I don’t know why he’d choose Pennsylvania. It’s filled with cold snow and chilly fall days. With cornfield stalks and small town gossip. Especially here in Hershey. Everyone knows everyone. I don’t mind Hen, I think she was an alright babysitter but I was too young to really be friends with her. It’s her mom that we really knew, me and Evan. Maddie was sort of friends with Hen I guess, but Aunt Antonia was almost like the neighborhood grandmother, although she hated that term, made her feel old.

She always had cookies to spare and some far off land food. Her house is decorated in tribal art and things I’ve never even heard of. She always had some funny tea that she said she could tell our fortune from. My parents didn’t like that, something about going against God. I think Aunt Antonia was great, a little cooky, but I never had a grandparent before. She was mine. Ours. She comforted me when no one else did, not that I blame my siblings, but she was there. So in a way Hen is like my cousin. It is nice to see her again, but I mostly only check up on Aunt Antonia. I’m glad I did though, either way, because the man she brings home ends up being by sister’s new honey.

His name is Howard, or Howie, but Hen calls him Chimney and after Aunt Antonia asks, “Who calls a man Chimney?” She laughs and says, “I’ll show you to your room.”

As soon as she’s gone Hen and Chimney’s eyes lock as Hen says, “We need our own place.”

Chimney doesn’t think she’s so bad at first and then he concedes, but then he meets my sister. Still going through nursing school, hair done up messily and a pen between her teeth. They bump into each other on Chimney’s run and Maddie apologies. Chimney’s angry but once their eyes lock I can tell that he will love her like I love May. And I can also see how he’s the furthest thing from Doug there ever was.

A piece of myself comes together.

“I’m Chimney, I just moved in with Hen. She’s my best friend so she let me stay until I get my own place, it’s nothing like what you’re thinking.”

Maddie laughs. “Did you say that all in one breath?” But back at home she’s telling Evan how cute the new neighbor is, and Evan is grinning up from his and May’s timeline of my death.

I was grateful for Evan to look for me, I want my murderer to not be so at ease, I feel more anger than love in those moments. But I look at my little brother pouring over some death notes, and I yearn for the day he meets his own May. Where he starts focusing on his grades and what he wants to do with his life. So far, this seems to be it.

~

My murderer begins to feel safe. He can live off of a memory for so long, and the cross I used to wear around my neck, he holds that in his life taking hands, rolls it beneath the skin, feeling everything that he did. Over and over.

I’m left watching, helplessly. I want him to be helpless. I want him to hurt the way everyone I care for is. That feeling is always here. I don’t know how to let it go. I don’t know how to let any of it go.

May’s given up her dream schools in order to stay in Hershey. She starts classes at the community college as Evan enters the eleventh grade. As Athena gets a new deputy. Someone who was transferred from Minnesota, a Bobby Nash. She and he don’t get along very well but I think it has something to do with Athena’s divorce. It’s stressful for May. I can see the way she worries after her mom, and I know that I’m not the only reason she doesn’t leave. Harry needs her. Just the way Evan needs me.

But Bobby’s alright. He even goes over my case file and orders a few more tests in a state’s lab in Los Angeles. When it comes back they find another blood sample, one that is not my own. It feels like a victory. One long sought after but I never thought that I’d actually get here. Athena stares wide eyed and before I can blink she’s kissing him, and Bobby is confused, uncertain, but he’s helpless against her, and that’s like my own mom, so I pull away.

“Gross.” I say into the cool air of the forest that surrounds us.

Shannon snickers. “You can look, but you might not always want to.” There’s a sadness in her eyes and something far off that I can’t quite touch, and I know that she’s not just talking of me, but of herself.

“At least she found someone.” I end up saying instead.

Shannon smiles softly. “Yeah. That’s one way to look at it.”

And sometimes she looks over the other end of the gazebo, and I wonder what she sees, but I never ask. Mostly I’m afraid to. There’s a dread in my stomach about it that I don’t fully understand yet.

But when I look back, he’s there. My murderer, and he is putting my cross away, and the panic overtakes me because he is… _Dissatisfied._ He can no longer feed after or on me, and I am left stricken with this knowledge. Because if I don’t feed him, who else will?

~

My murderer begins to build as my family’s lives blossom into something new. My mom starts sitting up in her bed, reaching for a book. Reading if only for a short time. But it’s more than she was, and my dad, he asks Evan how he is. He asks Maddie how nursing school is going. How her new boyfriend is. “Ch- Chimney? What a strange name.”

“Youcan call him Howard, dad.” Maddie says and her grin is almost breaking her cheeks.

Evan looks just as surprised and happy as his eyes shift from our sister our dad. “Classes are good, dad.”

“That’s good.” He doesn’t say anything more before he’s back in the garage with his models, but he said enough. Enough to spark even the littlest bit of hope into our chests as Maddie turns to Evan and asks him about college. Because Evan is eighteen in a week, and his life has passed by suddenly that my own chest aches. Because when did he grow up? Where have I been?

“What about nursing school? You’re graduating next month Maddie.” Evan says excitedly.

“I’ve got a job lined up at the hospital.” Maddie assures with a grin that’s truly happy. “But what about you?”

And Evan falters, because he doesn’t honestly know. He’s stuck with notebooks and reports, and everything that is my end. His beginning hasn’t even begun to come to fruition. “Evan…” My sister says concerned and maybe even frustrated. But the gentle kind, the kind that says that she cares.

“I don’t know, Maddie. I haven’t thought about it, honestly. Maybe the local college? My job at Red’s is going well.” Red’s, our local diner. It’s where we used to go for lunch, all of us, even my parents who looked around like it might have been dirt. Never classy enough for them, but it was my favourite. Evan’s. Maddie’s. It was our place during the day.

“You can’t be a waiter all your life.”

Evan just shrugs, and I know what he’s thinking. I can see it flashing in his eyes. _“Daniel was a football player all his life.”_ I wanted to work at the diner too. I told Evan that I was going to go and ask for a job the week before I was murdered. And Evan was so excited as he asked me if he’d get a free discount, or coupons.

But then it was over, and my brother has slipped into my shoes. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, I can’t tell. But I don’t want him to be stuck. I don’t want May to be.

“They’ll get there.” Shannon promises. “It just might take some time.”

I don’t know why or how she’d know, but I choose to believe her, because I have nothing else going for me to dispute that. Or to want to. Instead I turn to her and smile, and ask, “Let’s go see a picture.”

She grins too, because there’s popcorn here, and a theater, and something more than a gazebo, even if I can feel the dreamlike quality to it all. It’s not real, r _eal._ Real is in one direction to Earth, and to the other to Heaven. Where God is, _Jesus_. That’s what I’ve always been told, and that’s what I believe. But I can’t bear the thought of facing Him when I am still so angry and His Son said to forgive. But I don’t know how to.

I don’t know how to let any of them go. Any of it.

I think of May and her glossy lips, her eyes under the sun, and I want to kiss her. I want to be breathless and a _live._ I want to sneak out to Dairy Queen with Evan and Maddie, and get the chocolate dipped that Evan loves. The vanilla cones, and the sundaes. I want to shoot a touchdown and I want my brother on the field with me. I want Maddie cheering in the stands with my parents who love us. I want May to kiss me in victory, and I want the house and white picket fence. I want a life with dogs and kids, and art on the lawn, and footballs tossed. I want to _live._

“It’s not fair.” The words are less angry, more sad. More grieving as though I am grieving for myself now. And who knows? Maybe I am.

Shannon’s eyes are sad too and maybe she’s grieving for herself as well. Maybe she’s grieving for me. I rest my head on her shoulder and she pets my hair, as though I were her brother or her charge, and I wonder if she has a brother or maybe even a son. Or if she had a life too. A future. So sure and bright. Like me.

~

There’s a list of people that Evan and May have made of witnesses. Neighbors and school friends. People who they’ve marked as suspicious. They show it to Athena and Bobby, and they talked to them again. One of them is my murderer, but he’s not in the least bit concerned. As soon as they’re gone he puts his hand to his heart, beating wildly and alive, and he smiles. As though this were one big game.

He knows though, that the police will never catch him like that.

Athena apologizes to May but she runs off angry into the cornfield where a memorial lays. And Evan, he stands before Bobby’s gentle gaze, fists curled into balls of rage as he practically spits, “HOW CAN YOU LET THIS GO!”

Bobby nods to Athena who goes after her daughter, and Bobby pulls Evan aside and says, “We’re not letting this go. We’re going to keep trying. We’re going to keep looking. It’s not over, Buck. I know I wasn’t here when it happened but I promise you, for the both of us, that we won’t stop looking.”

And it’s the warm way in which he says it, the hand on Evan’s shoulder. The promise not to give up. The caring enough to say it. The parental love he never got that has Evan bursting into a fit of sobs. Crying in big hiccups for me, the way that he never felt that he was allowed to do before. And Bobby scoops him up and hugs him tight, and tells him about some tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert that maybe in another life I’d love to have.

Bobby takes him, and Evan for once, just enjoys his life.

And I smile, but I can’t smile for long because my murderer is building, and planning, and a sweat breaks out on his disgusting face. Fingers once filled with my blood put together nails and wood, and he’s working to build a new contraption. A new way to take a life. But it’s not just one life, I’ve come to realize that he takes, it’s a dozen. Everyone that I’ve touched with my life, I touched with my death too.

~

One might think that Evan would slow down on looking for me after Bobby’s talk, or May with Athena’s, but it seems they’re both just as determined, maybe even more so. May is more busy with classes, but Evan is in his final year of high school and he doesn’t care about college. He looks everywhere for me. For my murderer.

He starts running with Chimney, jogs in the morning as they get to know each other better because Chimney wants to purpose. Maddie wants to move and so does he, and they’re thinking of a house to share but Maddie won’t leave Evan alone. She promised. So they run, and Evan’s eyes linger on my murderer’s house.

My palms sweat and itch, because my murderer watches Evan too. I know that look. It’s how he used to look at me, and if I wasn’t so distracted looking at May, I might have even noticed. If my parents weren’t so distracted period, so maybe would have them. Maddie, if she didn’t have Doug, she definitely would have. Evan was too young. In a way, I was the perfect target, but I know that’s not what my murderer looks for. Not with the way the he has selected my baby brother next, the one surrounded by cops and people that care. The one who he already took so much from.

“It’s him.” He tells Bobby one day, and Bobby huffs a loud sigh because this isn’t the first time that Evan has come to him like this, angry and righteous, and so very sure. But he is right this time, and it doesn’t matter. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, but more than that… It’s the way Evan wants the whole world to suffer. To pay for the crimes against us all with the choking up of my blood and the varsity jacket in evidence lock up, never to be worn again.

“Buck…” Bobby starts.

“No!” Evan yells. “I know it’s him. I’m sure this time.”

“You were sure last time, and the time before that.”

“I am now. Bobby!” And he whines a little at the end, desperate for someone to believe him, and I can see in my sister’s eyes that she doesn’t quite believe him herself. It hurts to see, but Maddie backs him up as always anyway.

“Isn’t there something you can do?”

“We need evidence.” Athena says. “We can’t just go arresting people without reasonable cause.”

Evan swears, and he wants to run to May, I can see it in his features but May isn’t doing too well in her classes. She’s been more focused on me. And Evan is nothing if self-sacrificing. Saving others before himself. Something I’m not sure if he picked up because of me saving his life, or because of something else.

In the end they leave the police station, and the drive back is stony silence. “Evan…” Maddie tries.

“Don’t.” Evan bites back, and I’m left in a gazebo in the in-between, screaming at them both because I can’t watch this. My murderer is right there and he is planning, and my brother…!

I turn to Shannon. “What do I do?” I ask desperately.

And she’s sorry, always sorry as she tells me, “Nothing. There’s nothing you can do.”

But I don’t believe that for a second, because once I made Maddie hear my name. Once was enough for her to leave Doug and to have a better life. I can save Evan’s. _Fuck._ I can. They’re driving down the road and everything I have is in the window of my murderer’s house. I try to move the curtain. I try- I try- I try!

“ _EVAN!_ ”

Evan startles and looks up, and suddenly I’m there, in the window of my murderer’s house. The curtain drawn back, staring into the eyes of my little brother who drives by, and it is so good to be seen again. To be known. To see him, that tears prickle in my eyes, but it lasts only a moment before I’m back in a gazebo, and watching as Evan’s eyes widen in a car, yelling for Maddie to pull over.

When he runs over to the house though, the curtain is drawn back and I am gone.

“Did you see that!? Did you see that!”

Maddie looks on the verge of tears as she says, “Evan, I’m worried about you…. You have to let go! You have to stop this, I can’t take it anymore! Daniel’s dead.”

She’s crying and Evan is smiling in glee, and I don’t know how to feel. But eventually Evan loses his joy and comes over, eyes widened in surprise as he hugs our sister and says, “I- I’m sorry, Maddie. I’m sorry.”

They hug right there in the street, in front of my murderer’s house where he hums over his new work. One filled with blood stained images of my little brother. I’m so angry, I feel the winds begin to pick up, the dirty below my feet sinking into my shoes. Shannon’s hand on my arm, tightening.

“It’s okay. It will be okay. You’ll see.” She promises.

~

My little brother does not give up. He seems to, but I can see beneath that false façade of failure. His feet that tap against the hardwood floor in the kitchen, eyes dancing and on edge as he waits for Chimney to come by. They’re jogging again, down our street past my murderer’s house when Evan stops and stares at the window as my murder drives out of the garage. To work, I think. I don’t know. I don’t spend much time watching him. He doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t my eyes after everything that he’s already taken from me.

“Buck!” Chimney calls, arms held out as he jogs in one spot, clear questioning in his eyes.

Evan smiles all crooked and says, “I’ve got a muscle cramp, sorry. I’ll catch up!”

Chimney gives him one last glance before he nods and heads off first. I want him to come back and I want him to get as far away as possible. All my worry and concern is on Evan as he does the impossible. The daredevil in him coming out before anything else. His need to find me. His fearlessness that I always thought had laid dormant from our parent’s voices, comes back like a lion roaring as he runs to my murderer’s house and kicks a window inwards.

I’m leaning over the railing of the gazebo, my fingers piercing into the wood, making it go flying as I hold my breath. Shannon over my shoulder doing the same. “He’s really doing it.” She says in awe.

“Shh.” I whisper and she does.

We watch in a calculated silence as Evan runs up the stairs and looks through all the things my murderer keeps close to him. His fingers fly under charms held together by bells and whistles. He moves to my murderer’s bedroom, feet walking across the floor, light in the closet turning on and fingers scraping across wood. He was in woodshop for three years, he can see the discrepancy, and I gasp a breath as he opens the false back and reaches through the tiny crevice to a notebook filled with sketches, and bag of charms on a bracelet.

He pulls it all out and stares, and I watch him watch the cross grazing n the light of the bulb. “Daniel.” He whispers.

Fingers flying through pages, sketches of truth and horror wielded together, and I’m so focused on his discovery. On the truth of everything, of my brother finally finding me that even I don’t notice the car parking in the driveway. My murderer quiet as a mouse before the creak of the stairs alerts all three of us to his presence. 

“ _No_.” Shannon whispers.

And maybe Evan hears it, because he’s reaching for the window and pulling open just as suddenly, falling from second story as my murderer’s hand grasps through fallen hair. My brother on the ground of grass, wheezing, the wind knocked out of him.

“Get up!” I scream. “Get up!”

Eventually he does, hands enclosing around the bracelet of charms and a book of lost names. He runs all the way home and stops in the living room where our sister stands, as does May. All peering into the kitchen where Athena sits and our mom has finally gotten out of bed. She’s dressed and showered, and offering coffee. She even smiles.

“There you are, Evan.” She says.

And I watch as Evan slips the book behind his back, the bag of charms as May walks over, eyes narrowed. “Where have you been?” She asks. “Chimney came back and couldn’t find you. Buck, you didn’t…”

“Why are you just standing there, come and have some coffee.” Mom says, and Athena smiles, and so do I as the tears come to my eyes and our father walks in, wiping his hands of glue from the models. Smiling, engaged, and kissing his wife’s cheek.

Everyone moves over to do just that, but before they can completely, Maddie stops and stares at what’s hidden behind our brother’s back. “What do you got there, Evan?” She asks.

And Evan hides it away, eyes nervous and scared, shifting from her our perfect family scene although it will never perfect. Our mom’s hands still shake and our father will never speak like he used to. There’s an empty chair that will never be filled and hands that will never be held in grace. My hands. _My life._

Maybe that’s what makes him decide, I don’t know, but suddenly Evan has the items out and is holding them up. He almost smiles, but what he saw, it’s too awful to smile.

“Evidence.”

Athena comes over and opens the book, and we both read the names of the lost ones.

~

 **Grace Williams** , March 3rd 1967\. _She was twenty three and closing up her family store when a car pulled up and she got in. She was never seen again. Her fiancé Judd never stopped searching for her, even after all these years._

 **Marjan Marwani** , December 22nd 1968\. _She was sixteen, on her way to a friend’s house when a man with a beard called her over to the community garden. A passerby noted the interaction, but try as they might they could never find the man, or her. Her school sweetheart has never gone a day without thinking of her._

 **Mateo Chavez** , June 12th 1971\. _A freshman in a local college, he went out to a job interview one night and never returned. His big sister still puts up missing person flyers._

 **Tyler Kennedy Strand** , March 7th 1973\. _Known as TK to his friends, he went home with a guy at a party, a known drug user the working theory has always been that he overdosed and froze in some Illinois forest. His father disagrees with it wholeheartedly, and still tries to do this day to have his case reopened and reassigned as suspicious._

 **Shannon Diaz** , July 3rd 1975\. _She was twenty two and got into a fight with her husband about visiting her dying mother. In the end she left anyway, but a few days later her mom called her husband wondering where her daughter was. She had vanished. Shannon’s son and husband still look for her to this day, hoping that one day she’ll just walk in through the front door as though nothing happened._

 **Daniel Buckley** , November 17th 1977\. _I was sixteen, on my way home after football practice and finally getting the date I’ve always dreamed of with the girl I’ve always loved. I was lured into a cornfield by a neighbor I thought I could trust. I died choking on my own blood and sinking into dirt. My body was never found. My little brother never stopped trying to find me, and neither did my girl, May._

~

“I’m sorry.” I say to Shannon, and she smiles with tears in her eyes.

“I’ve been waiting for you.” She says instead of answering and we both watch as Evan meets her husband, Eddie and her son Christopher in a courtroom where my murderer pleads guilty to all six counts.

They bump into each other and smile, and Shannon explains it as, “Sometimes some people are just meant to be in each other’s lives.”

“God?” I ask, somewhat confused and she smiles, more happy and sure.

“Are you ready?”

And I’m not sure if I am, but when she gives me her hand, I take it, and we both step out of this gazebo together as Evan and May step into the police academy together. _Detective Buckley and Detective Grant._ It has a nice ring to it.

“I think I need to find somewhere to start fresh, you know? For him.” Eddie says to Evan over dinner as the trial wraps up.

And Evan grins as he ruffles Christopher’s hair. “Have you ever thought about Hershey?”

The gazebo cracks and falls apart behind us, as Shannon guides me to that sun and to fields of golden wheat. Not a dead cornfield, but a live field. Where the sun sparkles, and a tree waits, blossoming into flowers made of crowns. Where the spirits of the people who died by my murderer’s hand come out in dancing footfalls and smiles. And it is, so, so beautiful.

“What is this place?” I ask breathless as I see something even more amazing behind them all.

And Shannon grins wide as she starts to dance with them. “It’s Heaven!”

And I cry, and nothing hurts anymore. May is smiling and she is beautiful, but I let her go. My siblings. My family. My life. I slip away from it into something brand new. Something that makes living forever worth it. Forgiveness unfurls in me like a blossoming flower.

In the distance I see God, I see His Son.

I smile. At peace.

_Heaven._

~


End file.
